The series of “House” party ads that Mike’s Hard Lemonade have started running are pretty effective and funny in the way that they domesticate tropes of the uncanny.

In my favorite, the host of the party answers the door bell, and a headless deer simply stands on the doorstep, breathing. The mounted head in the room behind him asks “Who is it?” because he can’t move his (dead) head to see who is at the door. The camera cuts back to a point-of-view shot from the party host, angle tilted down to show the standing, breathing, corpse. It’s like the body has come in search for its owner. The mounted head over his shoulder blinks , then asks in a normal-enough voice, just like any one of the guests: “Seriously, who is it?” The host stands just stands between them, puzzled. The commercial cuts to its end cap, a hand spilling a chilly malt beverage from a wet bottle into an icy glass: “Mike’s Lemonade: Always different, always refreshing.”

Like good flash fiction, the scenarios in these ads drive home the “always different” tagline in a way that suggests that the unexpected is omnipresent, always standing on the threshold right outside your doorway (and the entire series of ads are identical up until the doorbell rings). The use of the uncanny trope of the dismembered body part that acts on its own accord is the central motif of this particular ad) there are others in the series that use familiar icons of the horror and dark fantasy genre, like the scarecrow doing house calls, or the 30 foot woman who returns to pick up her lost giant shoe), but the talking mounted head and the ambulatory deer carcass are perhaps my favorite because they most clearly show that the uncanny is both in and out of the household — which is another way of saying that the unfamiliar is always already built into the familiar, and that the domestic space is inherently haunted by what it excludes by the artificial boundary line of property.

I also really like that the deer on the doorway is shown simply breathing. I have written earlier on this blog about “living, breathing death” (“the autonomous movement of fur”) and I can’t help but notice it here, too. The ad seems to suggest that the house party host is encountering the spirit of the game he’s bagged…and ends right on the edge of a horror movie revenge scenario. There is almost a rhetorical appeal here, manifested as a return of repressed guilt for hunting game — a theme that might suggest that the violence required for hunting for animal trophies is inhumane and not so easily forgotten.

But there is another, deeper element of this ad (and all of the “House” ads) that some viewers might not spot right away, if at all, which is really worth noting.

There are women in these ads, but we never see their heads. They are all legs (even, if not especially, in the 30 ft. woman spot). The blocking of the shots literally cuts off their heads, aligning them with the deer whose head is separated from its legs. By association, women are but trophies. This may very well be why the absurdist comedy undercuts the serious horror here, and why the uncertain “oh well” shrug off ending of the advertisement doesn’t follow through on the “revenge of the deer” scenario that it implies.

Of course, beer ads are notorious for the objectification of women, so this analysis really doesn’t say anything really new. The uncanny in advertising often masks the common and familiar by distracting viewers away from the ideologies it indulges. The lesson here is simply that Mike’s Lemonade ad is perhaps not so very “different,” after all.

Thing (sometimes spelled “Thingg”) — the ambulatory hand that lives in a box and serves as a literal “handyman” to The Addams Family — is perhaps the most uncanny character from a television show that literally domesticated the alien and unfamiliar into the world’s first “gothic” sitcom family and in many ways signaled a watershed moment in the popularization of the Freudian uncanny through post-WWII television broadcast. Indeed, as a dismembered hand, he might as well be torn directly from Freud’s catalog of Das Unheimlich — as one of those “dismembered limbs that move of their own accord” and as such harbor doom and dread…to which I would add laughter, which often is a hallmark of uncanny unease.

In this wonderfully campy commercial from Nikon, we are given all the obvious trappings of the uncanny, beyond just the presence of Thing: the gothic mansion of the Addams’ house, the presence of Vincent Price’s voice, and the opening title (“The Hand with Five Fingers” — riffing off Robert Florey’s classic dismembered hand film from 1946, The Beast with Five Fingers (which no doubt highly influenced Addam’s creation of Thing to begin with). But there are many other strange things going on in this commercial worth brief comment:

Although 1985 was almost thirty years ago, it was an appeal to nostalgia even when it was released. The Addams Family had been in syndication for at least fifteen years by this point (the show aired in 1964), though it would still be another six years or so before the first film adaptation of it (and of Charles Addams‘ original comics, which appeared in the late 1940s). In other words, The Addams Family as it was known in the 80s (and as it is known today) has and is always dislocated in time, and always already a copy of another version of itself. So the commercial is something of a mediated doppelganger.

Part of the humor of this ad is in something that we might neglect to consider: that a hand has no eyes. It doesn’t need them. The camera is privileged as a magical object because it “automatically” sees for him, doing all the work. You don’t need human or artistic agency at all to use the One Touch, is the implied message. Even a corpse could use it. Thus, the supernatural “power” of the camera’s automatic lighting and auto-focus is what is really being treated as uncanny here, through an association with Thing. The magic is available “at the push of a button”…or “at everybody’s fingertips.”

Because film is film, the commercial is highly self-referential, and not only in the Addams Family references. This is a commercial for a camera, shot by a camera, and the latter seeks to hide its own presence. But note how the ad uses black-and-white stock for the commercial, but when Thing takes snapshots of his “frightened” subjects they flash in “freeze frame” on the screen in color. Thus, the photographic images are made more “present” (in current time/color) than what they actually inherently are — moments from the past, captured in time.

It is interesting that viewers — potential consumers — are aligned with the subject position of a free-floating ambulatory limb. It is an agency without identity. In the context of the narrative of the commercial, it is even more interesting that all the photographs are taken of domestic servants (a maid, a butler…) rather than characters who actually appeared in The Addams Family. Now, in the TV show’s narrative, Thing himself (itself?) often performs as one of the family’s servants and is more like Lurch than like Uncle Fester in that regard. So by taking photos of his co-workers, and instilling fear in them, the uncanny commodity that is being pitched implies a sort of power move — a superiority over his fellow laborers — which slyly suggests that if you purchase this camera, you will attain a “magical” status symbol. The clever humor of the commercial and its nostalgic approach to the media masks this rhetoric.

The merchandising of The Addams Family is a wonderful example of the Popular Uncanny, and the strange way that strangeness is domesticated. It is a little sad to see Thing — who actually has some subversive agency on the original show, since he is a metaphor for the alienated worker literally represented as a “thing” instead of a human being — here redefined as an agency of pure consumption. This topic deserves much more attention, and perhaps I’ll come back to it later, but for now I leave you with another commercial that is “uncannily” similar in some ways to the Nikon One Touch.

It seems like we’re about to enter a period where our digital lives will be full of the online equivalents of those messages you find on your television when you check into a hotel; always welcoming someone who’s got a name a bit like yours. Never actually your name. And you wish they just hadn’t bothered, you wish they’d just issued a general, warm welcome and not tried to connect at a level they just didn’t really feel (because if they’d have really felt it they’d have made sure they’d have gotten your name right.)

This online marketing revolution is going to generate quite a lot of these creepy feelings. We’re going to be wondering how companies know so much about us, why they’re talking to us in such a familiar way and how come they get everything just slightly wrong. At this point we might find ourselves responding more favourably to those brands and advertisers that can master the compelling generalisation and the universal truth. We might remember that great communicators can connect with millions by knowing only one thing about us, that we’re all people.

The loss of boundaries between private and public is often felt as an uncanny threat to the ego. Here the paranoid sense that secrets have been uncovered by monolithic, nameless marketers — lurking behind the anonymous slush of daily messaging like ghosts — is described in a progressive way. I hope advertisers listen to this truth, while remaining sensitive to the dangers of overgeneralization (or “compelling generalisation and the universal truth”). Advertisers will still be seeking the transcendent signifier, the godlike omnipotence, that lends them supernatural power and psychic presence where they otherwise have none. Advertising cannot survive without the magic system in the 21st century, even when it is “on demand.”

On the Uncanny . . .

… it is possible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious mind of a ”compulsion to repeat” proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts — a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the impulses of small children; a compulsion, too, which is responsible for a part of the course taken by the analyses of neurotic patients. All these considerations prepare us for the discovery that whatever reminds us of this inner ”compulsion to repeat” is perceived as uncanny.